Leonard Burman Quotations

It's generating a huge portion of our tax revenues,

The deficit is a little smaller because of this voluntary tax.

The subsidies encourage people to get insurance at work, stifling the individual non-group market, and they encourage employers to provide overly generous insurance since the cost is subsidized. What's more, the subsidy is upside down - aiding mostly the high-income families that would probably purchase insurance under any scenario, and providing little aid to those of modest means.

The experience with past employer (tax) credits is they're not particularly effective,

There was a proposal in Congress that would raise a point of order against any tax proposal that would not deal with the AMT. It died.

This is a problem that should have been dealt with when we had the money, and it wasn't.

All economists agree tax policy has an effect on the economy. The hard thing is to figure out how to measure these effects in the real world.

Will Rogers once said, 'If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.' Medicare is in a deep hole. Maybe it is time to stop digging.